These are not the emaciated, starving we sometimes see in news coverage from around the world, but people the federal government classifies as “food insecure.” That can mean skipped meals, not knowing how to pay for the next trip to the grocery store, cheap calories.

By a number of measures, more Minnesotans are falling into this category — more tell surveyors they have difficulty finding meals, more use food stamps, more use food shelves.

So for several months, MPR News reporter Julie Siple has been exploring the contours of this issue. She’s covered food waste, missed meals, the changing face of food shelves, how school lunch programs address the problem in summer. And she’s written about the people taking action to make a difference.

Ground Level has pulled this archive of stories together and added background material, data and a collection of additional resources to learn more. It’s a one-stop shop of sorts and is the latest in a collection of topic pages we’re building to help Minnesotans learn about challenges in their communities and find avenues to take action.

About the blogger

Dave Peters directs MPR’s project on community journalism, looking for ways Minnesota residents are making their towns, cities and neighborhoods better places to live. He joined MPR News in 2009 after more than 30 years as a newspaper and online reporter and editor.

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This is very well done, and yet pretty chilling. We all think we know about hunger in far away place and “how hard it must be for those poor people”. But we are protected (think we are) because “how much difference could I, as one peson, possibly make to hunger in Mali?”

This series of articles brings it home and shows that it really is our own neighbors who are hungry and in need, it is our very own neighbors who could benefit from our own individual actions. It clearly is a call to action at the local scale, where all action is personal.